


to arise in perfect light;

by petrichor (findingkairos)



Series: a belief in the unbelievable [1]
Category: Japanese Mythology, Katekyou Hitman Reborn!, 大神 | Okami (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, Gen, Mistreatment of Children, Mythology - Freeform, Sawada Nana's A+ Parenting, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 10:35:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13386024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/petrichor
Summary: This planet might have been inhabited by the Earthlings first, but faith is a funny thing.Or, Amaterasu still watches over the children of her Fire.





	to arise in perfect light;

The fifty-first time Tsuna’s classmates pushed him down at the playground and called him _Dame_ , his mother patched up his scrapes and patted him on the head and told him, “You’ll always be my Dame-Tsuna.”

The words brought a pang to his heart and stilled the breath in his lungs. But six years old and weeks after his father came back with the old man that made the world go foggy and distant and hard to walk and months after his friends became just his classmates, Tsuna bit his lip and refused to cry.

It made his mother laugh, a sound that came through muffled like the time his classmates had pushed his head under the water and held him there, and Tsuna only stayed for the few minutes it took for his mother to go back humming to her cooking before he took the chance to slip out the back door and into the street.

There was a forest surrounding Namimori that all children were told not to venture into, and there was a stretch of it near his house. It was a place that all six-year-old Tsuna knew was that his classmates wouldn’t follow and his mother wouldn’t find him, and once he was there he was too distracted by the summer fireflies and green, bright grass to notice when the sky grew darker and darker.

Twilight came and went, and the stars rose in the sky. Tsuna laid on his back in a small clearing that gave him a perfect view of them when he grew tired of running around trying to catch fireflies, and wondered at them. They were blurry, and it was cold, and the shadows were growing longer; but he couldn’t make himself leave the peace of the forest and return to his mother’s smiles and well-meant cooing that still made something in his tummy turn.

The wind rustled through the trees, and it grew colder, and eyes blinked in the night and Tsuna almost cried, once, and then he did when it felt like something was crawling up his back and there was a whisper in the air and something very much like the hissing of a snake but without anything in the shadows, which sometimes moved and had _eyes_ , and-

He stopped breathing when a stag with the largest antlers he’d ever seen with flowers and other green growing things dripping off of them stepped close enough for him to see the whites of its eyes.

Tsuna blinked first, and the stag, apparently satisfied, continued its slow walk into the forest. Six years old and no matter what his classmates said, he was smart enough to hold his breath until the stag’s lines blurred into the shadows.

And then Tsuna curled his knees to his chest and cried, until his eyes were red and he had no more tears.

When he wiped his eyes there was something white right out of sight, half-hidden behind trees and bushes and flowers, and there was a silence here that hadn’t been here before. The shadows, when he looked, where empty. The wind was quiet and only soothing instead of carrying a feeling of illness.

Tsuna waved a thank-you to the white figure out in the trees, because it was white and maybe it reflected the moonlight and might be a little unworldly, with how the edges smoothed out into smoke, but he was raised to be polite, and he staggered his way back home.

* * *

He spent a lot of time in the forest, after that, because even the bullies were afraid of the forest and though they called him _Dame-Tsuna_ for running in there, they never followed.

At the end of the second day the white figure revealed itself into a large white dog, like nothing that he’d seen before. Its sudden appearance from the undergrowth made Tsuna flinch, at first, before stilling, because he was small and it was big and there was _no way_ he’d be able to outrun it.

But then it bounded up to him and licked his face and behaved for all the world just like he thought a friend would - smiling, laughing doggy laughs, and backing away when the world wasn’t bright enough and the sounds weren’t loud enough and everything was too muffled, Tou-san I can’t breathe-

He spent a lot of time getting to know its residents, too. After a week Tsuna could recognize the small pine tree that had the best shade and friendly squirrels living in its branches; after two he knew the great red birds that roosted in the large pines further into the forest that eyed him as they passed but if he was polite - and he always was, because this was their home and he was a guest - they would leave him be.

That was a different thing: if Tsuna was polite, no one here would harm him, or chase him, or make him cry. They would all glance at him and then the white dog at his side that dwarfed him and realize something and then keep their distance. It meant that Tsuna could walk its paths and tread quietly and be alright, and in the summer the forest became a haven.

“What’s your name?” he finally asked, when the dog had pulled him into the river with her - he had learned what a boy dog and a girl dog looked like, in the third week, because calling them an _it_ was impolite, and that had been a fun day when the dog had looked at him as if she knew what he was doing and was unimpressed with him - and made him wet.

She panted in a doggy-laugh and Tsuna frowned as far as he could, scrunching up his face.

“All the dogs in the neighborhood have names!” he cried finally when it was apparent she wouldn’t stop laughing. “There’s Kyou and Ran and Mai and Yori! You should have one, too!”

The dog closed her mouth and tilted her head and her dark eyes were flat and like a starless sky. Tsuna stared at them for awhile before he shook himself and frowned as hard as he could again.

Then she sneezed, and the world _shattered_ , and the sun was the sun again.

Tsuna was a six-year-old, still. He fell, fully expecting to hit the ground, but not the white fluff and hard muscle underneath. He hit his nose on her rib and his cheek on her stomach, but she caught him, and he was surrounded by warmth and he could feel his _fingers_ and _toes_ properly and, and-

“Are you the sun?” he asked. The fog that had settled when the old man had come had _lifted_ , and Kaa-chan always said that the sun would drive away the fog.

The dog licked his face.

“Nikko-san it is,” Tsuna declared. Sunlight. Like the ones slanting through the pine trees, like the ones that sometimes the great big red birds looked like they were wreathed with. There were red lines under Nikko-san’s eyes, now, and Tsuna reached out a hesitant hand towards them to touch.

“Thank you.” It was a whisper, but it was reverent, and at that Nikko-san stilled and withdrew, just a little, just enough that she looked like she was considering him. The lines did not grow but they deepened, darkened, and the instinct that had helped him with the bullies before the old man had cast the fog said that there would be more.

“Thank you,” he said again, and at _that_ Nikko-san looked annoyed and proceeded to snuffle him in the stomach, her wet nose so ticklish that Tsuna laughed and kept laughing until he could shove her off of him.

**Author's Note:**

> In Japan, [trees, forests, and religion](http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1659/0276-4741%282004%29024%5B0179%3ATFARIJ%5D2.0.CO%3B2) tend to be extremely interconnected. 
> 
> Comments are my lifeblood and my motivation and I love them all dearly!


End file.
